Yeah I've thought about the question there of like is it acceptable then for those managing the instance to collect a percentage of transactions in the case where they provide payment management, arbitration, etc. Because if someone is a bad actor on Lemmy or mastadon you just ban them or the instance, but in the case of money changing hands that's more difficult to administer

Yeah, I guess I'm old enough to remember TVs being referred to a such hah 😅

That's good to know, I see is avail on Yunohost, too

...this is the first time in the entire Fediverse that I feel not-that-old 👀

Agreed! Tho lemmy and mastodon work decently well for that already

The issue in the US with accepting payments on behalf of sellers is that you have to then collect sales tax which is different for every locality. Then you also have to issue tax forms to the sellers for sales over a certain amount. Which leaves us with sellers collecting payments on their own which means using something like PayPal or Bitcoin. You would just have to have people build trust through reviews and hope for the best. You could base the service in a random other country so that you wouldn't have a bunch of regulations to deal with and leave all the tax stuff up to the buyers and sellers. You'd probably run into issues with accepting credit cards though.

Less memes. I feel like that is all this site is now..

outside of the ask

More outside of the question.

More users.

Interesting ... It looks pretty active. A few dozen instances, mainly in Germany. This has real potential.

Most of the usage of platform is individual-based and it's a problem. Collective-based interaction, like in the threadiverse, leads to a better sense of community, better organizing, better software that really helps us, etc...

I would like to see more wiki-like usage, where we congregate around topics/subjects/interests and collectively build something with rules we decide ourselves

MMORPG!

and moderation is crucial: toxicity pushes people away, so we should maybe try to not push our content creators (actual and potential) away.

AmITheAsshole was always fun...

Oh, and hamsters! There's not a fediverse hamster community that compares to the hamster subreddits yet

What about something like wero integration? Isn't that supposed to be peer-to-peer?

I get that the trust is another issue though. What happens when a person gets stiffed? Who's guaranteeing the purchase or vetting sellers?

Also known as the "boob tube" with "boob" being a synonym for "idiot". I'm not that old...

Unlikely. The leftists actually put in the work to create and populate an entire alternative Reddit (multiple actually: Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, nodeBB, etc.). And the rightists too (multiple actually: Truth Social, X, nostr, etc.). If the centrists truly want something, then somebody is going to have to actually make something happen.

On darknet markets they use an escrow account and admins act as mediators, so as long as you can show that you have a valid tracking number. The issue becomes when people try to scam you by selling you broken electronics or scam buyers pulling fraud returns. Weirdly this is common with VCRs on eBay. There's large resellers who buy good VCRs and steal parts out of them and return them. Then they resell on Amazon. I guess it comes back to having a karma system.

OpenStreetMap is frankly about as good as a crowdsourced map can possibly be.

And it's always improving. Mobile apps like CoMaps let you add business information. There are also apps like Every Door, MapComplete, or SCEE, which particularly emphasize updating OSM on the go.

There are apps for adding photos, such as Mapilary or Panoramax, which are not built into OSM, but built on top of it.

There have been a few attempts at FOSS review projects, like lib.reviews or mangrove.reviews, although it is tricky to reach critical mass.

Each of these are huge organizational challenges and data management challenges on their own. Without selling ads or mining data, it's hard for me to imagine a single project that does evey part and does it well.

Absolutely. The organizations that have the most to gain and the most capability to manage instances are

• local governments,
• news publishers/journalists, and
• Universities

These are groups that have unique publishing and legal mandates that already have the IT departments and adequate sway to compel users. They already host email and websites, and regularly come into conflict with corporate messaging platforms.

Not the one you're replying to, but I'd generally agree.

If someone wants to post on Peertube, they basically either have to have the time, funding, and know-how to self-host, or arrive with an established audience. Someone with great creative talent does not necessarily want to run an expensive and complicated software project. Someone who has an established audience has very little incentive to jump to federation.

PeerTube is improving slowly. There are now a few instances with open registration, which could mean more fertile ground for good content. We shall see.

I'd love to see that wonderful interoperability we were all promised. It should be possible to have one identity/account that's connected to multiple services. I should be able to log in once, post some thoughts on Mastodon, share a photo on Pixelfed, and comment on a PeerTube video. Some services have tried to combine various formats with a little success, but it has been very limited, and generally broken.

My main problem is the lack of discoverability. Maybe the content is just not there, but even if it is I don't think I'd be able to find it. And I regularly try.

OK, so not the software, but the accessibility for non-techy people

I upvoted you for downvoting the guy who complained about being downvoted.

Bitcraft claims to have open sourced its code.

Monetization broker for a video service. Let's give Youtube a run for the money.

Hosted gaming system, card games, board games, tabletop simulator style. Maybe Minecraft java, built around self hostable servers.

E2E Encryption Communication, maybe a tightly integrated reticulum host.

Dedicated news system focused on free journalism (hard with AI and propaganda I know)

Shore up Pixelfed and Loops or Competition for them.

Some form of integrated system that ties all this stuff together, like a dashboard with all your different things. Maybe something like the homeassistant dashboard but for all your fedi services.

That would be great!

So I have some advice that you might already be thinking/implementing.

For Lemmy use your three buckets well.

You have,

1. All

2. Local

3. Subscribed

4. Use 'all' feed for keeping an eye out on that bigger social media and taking the value of being 'informed' on the current narratives and events.

5. Pick an area of relatively specific interest, i see your currently on our premier Marxist/Leninist server, if thats anything like Aussie Zone its a completely different bucket of topics thar you will hopefully be able to relate to in a very different way to the 'All' feed. If your local server is fairly sleepy or not that different from 'all' considwr moving server fedidb or Lemmy Verse might help with server selection.

6. Use subscribed to drill down and keep a tight list of the niche communities rhat will really keep you happy, don't subscribe if you only think its important to keep abreast of, keep that list as your happy place. 😊

I've recently joined Mastodon. For individual to individual connection it is better. So to my surprise, I've found Lemmy and Mastodon work well used as a pair. Even though if I want to, I can see the agonisingly embarrassing comments I make on lemmy very easily from my Masto account.

More adoption by the public

Agreed - can’t say for sure if this is my instance / communities or not but Lemmy seems to have a very particular political bent and it’s pretty narrow. On top of this there are some dominant narratives that I wouldn’t count as “politics” but which are inescapable - and heaven help you if you say something interesting that doesn’t affirm one of these narratives.

Something like a Mastodon+ where besides hosting just our microblog posts, each account would also have a modest amount of storage (maybe just 1 GB or even less) for a personal mini-website as part of our profile, where we could have other content in a more stable place for people to access-- for example essays, tutorials, reference info, fiction/poetry, pdfs for download, whatever someone might want to make available that isn't just a temporary toot that quickly scrolls away into the sunset.

The account profile would have a link that opens to a personal "home page" which is just a list of links to the various files (with room for description text for each link).

For the user there could be a settings page with a template to enter "Description: link" lines for each piece of content, and buttons to upload/manage the content files. Preferably the content pages would be in markdown format and would be rendered for the browser like the way github does with readme files. That way users wouldn't have to know how to do HTML.

This idea is because getting a domain, learning html, and creating a website is just not something most people can or want to deal with, but would still like to be able to have a place to put some of their stuff online. Another possible option might be ability to specify whether the personal mini-website is available to public, instance members, followers only, or mutuals only.

There is flohmarkt.

neocities?

So Lemmy and Mastodon are mirrors of two popular forms of social media; what I think might be the next real step is innovation.

No, not a fediverse AI, something more human and "old web". A federated forum system paired with a solid fedi-search engine could do slot of good - especially with the walled gardens and AI slopfest that the surface net is becoming.

But is it federated via activitypub?

Forums for long, linear discussion, like phpBB or Discourse, with good discoverability.

I do miss a good forum. That used to be my favorite thing about the internet.

There are apps for adding photos, such as Mapilary

just in case you don't know, mapillary is a facebook project

There have been a few attempts at FOSS review projects, like lib.reviews or mangrove.reviews, although it is tricky to reach critical mass.

I think it's even impossible if not accessible in a popular OSM map app

More non-English communities.

The Fediverse it's pretty English-centric and there are very few communities of non-English speakers, even huge languages like Spanish with hundreds of millions of people.

Its a starting point

Discourse has an ActivityPub plugin: https://discourse.org/plugins/activitypubThis plugin, for example, is enabled on SocialHub https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/about (it's a forum for fediverse developers)

Thank you so much for taking the time to lay that all out for me. I'm sure you've had to do it once or twice already, lol. I'll absolutely start curating the stuff I'd rather see. Maybe part of the friction I'm feeling is a procedural rub with marxists/leninists, and it would make sense/be hilarious if I've wandered into the middle of their space.

Do you have any less political servers you'd recommend? Besides the servers/services you recommended? Or is it largely an issue with the server i'm on?

the bigger it gets, the more the memes will become everything.

agreed though. way too many memes, not enough legit information anymore.

Neocities and such are still non-fediverse platforms, and the users would still have to know how to do html and set up a website.

The idea was that since Mastodon already has the ability to store your micro-blog posts, as well as images and clips (and has a media button to view the posts that contain them), that it would be convenient for users to also be able to store a few articles or documents as well.

I suppose to make it simpler, these other types of files could also just be attachments to posts the way media files are, and there could be a button to view the posts containing them as well. That would be a lot simpler to implement than my idea, but it would be harder for others to find them and for the user to organize and present them.

Thanks, I did not realize. I just did a quick search because I remembered an app but couldn't remember the name. Must be something else.

Edit: Maybe it was mapillary after all. They were acquired by Meta in 2020. A better option looks to be KartaView.

I agree with this. Outside of German, I’ve found it very difficult to find communities in other languages. I couldn’t tell whether those communities didn’t exist at all or whether they were simply not discoverable.

I am a bit disappointed by all the federated social media kinda being boring clones of existing things instead of branching out more. More customizability would be nice. Just got Marvis for apple music and I really like the idea of setting smart rules for my social media feeds. (Creating your own algorithm) Cyberspace.online is a pretty interesting looking alt take on social media, not open source tho I don't think.

Something that lets us create our own profiles like myspace would be nice, using threejs or some sht to allow for interactive experiences